Helping Teachers Improve STEM Education

A new grant from the Spencer Foundation will help teachers like Molly Grew, who served through Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education.

Across America, the educational community is united on the need for improved education in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

But as teachers look to adopt successful methods to help their students, they often run up against a simple problem: without detailed feedback on their students' learning habits, it's hard for teachers to know what works.

A new Notre Dame study will give teachers a boost.

The Spencer Foundation has awarded the Notre Dame Center for STEM Education with a $300,000 grant to study how indicators of student learning can help middle-school science teachers improve their instructional practices.

The grant is part of the Spencer Foundation's "Evidence for the Classroom" initiative, a collaboration between Dr. Hilda Borko of Stanford University, Dr. Felipe Martinez of UCLA, and Dr. Matt Kloser, the director of the Center for STEM Education.